Males Love VideoLongTime
It’s been a reading week for me. Lots of great stuff to mull over and help shape ones thinking about digital media. Lets start with a report by consultancy Frank N. Magid & Associates with the irresistibly tantalizing header “80% of 18 – 24 Males Watch Online Video“. Only 53% of their female counter-parts are watching an equal amount of video. The report goes on to claim that news clips are the most watched content type. Teenage cat fights, skating injuries and soft-core porn dont even chart according to the report thus greatly reducing its credibility. Via Digital Media Wire

Ladies Love Drunk TextingEver gotten a drunk text at 3am from a former girlfriend, proclaiming her undying love and mounting desire for you? Maybe this just happens to me… Well, thanks to a new survey put out by Samsung we now have some fun research on these women. Yup folks, the technocrats at Samsung have put out a pretty funny research report outlining some of the cell usage behaviors of single women. The title is a good indication of the rest of the report: “Single Mobile Females Find New BFF: Their Cell Phone“. It’s a funny fast read lite on details with blog worthy data pulls like 40% of women experience “text shame” the morning after texting while inebriated.

(Image from Blaugh click image for full carton including funny caption)

Somethings in this world just make sense. You dont have to be told how or why, you just intuitively feel the rightness of it. My first encounter with ice cream inside a cone shaped cookie was one such a moment, melted cheddar on tuna between two slices of rye was another. Without explanation or commentary, these thing just made sense. The Long Tail, while not as moving an experience as the meeting of cream and cone, was another of those things that just made sense. But no sooner did Chris Anderson publish his tale of new markets, new models and new money then some print media hater chime in with a few barbed critiques aimed at souring what had been a pretty universal love fest for the book. What ensued over the course of the next several days was a somewhat less then epic battle of pundits with snippy comments and declarations of victory on all sides. Read the rest of this entry »

Why is everyone is rushing to create the best walled garden for other peoples stuff? From their random musings, to their pictures and videos, it seems that everyone has bought into the idea that if you collect enough UGC (Unlikely to Generate Cash) a business will magically appear. The alchemist running UGC sites would have us believe that they can harness the magical powers of the Long Tail and transform UGC lead into advertising gold. While I’m no expert in the properties of power law distributions, nothing I’ve read about the Long Tail would indicate that a million audiences of one is the same as one audience of million. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m thinking of a buzzword (well actually a phrase). Its mention may inspire some of your peers and strike fear in the hearts of others. This phrase could be used to bring the excitement of Conker to a larger audience or profitably shine a spotlight on the thrill of Chess boxing. It’s a word that could be used to vilify the backward ways of luddite media elitists, bent on aggregating mass audiences with homogenized content or laud the visionary action of online retailers willing to sell anything in a desperate (but valiant) effort to stay in business.The phrase I’m thinking of is the Long Tail. That’s right, it has gone from being a mere buzzword used to spice up executive presentations, to a fully capitalized noun (big L, big T). Yet it remains a poorly understood concept by either its many excited fans or its few detractors.